© Jen Shook/National Geographic

I am a National Geographic Explorer and Young Leader, a Lewis and Clark Field Scholar, and am currently a Rose Postdoctoral Fellow, studying hummingbirds, with Dr. Irby Lovette and Dr. Maren Vitousek at the Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. Until August 2020, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Cory Williams at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where I studied seasonal depression (Seasonal Affective Disorder) in Nile grass rats. I graduated with a PhD in December 2018 from the department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University, New York where I worked with Dr. Catherine Graham and Dr. Don Powers from George Fox University, studying how hummingbirds budget their energy across a number of sites in Arizona and Ecuador. And before that, I got a Master’s from Pondicherry University, India, studying nesting hornbills in the Western Ghats, and a Bachelor’s in Zoology and Biotech from Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. I am broadly interested in how animals manage their energetic needs. I love giving talks and communicating science, especially to the public (but also to scientists)! Have a talk idea or request? Contact me!

Hummingbirds are incredible animals, with among the highest metabolic rates of all vertebrates. What energetic strategies do they use to survive? How do they allocate their limited energy budgets to different activities? Read my blog page to see how I went about answering these questions!

My interests include: whole-animal physiology, ecology, respirometry, field physiology, doubly labeled water, behavioural ecology, birds, reptiles, coding in R, managing data, producing graphics/videos for the public, photography, grant-writing (love it), giving talks, teaching, and mentoring.

1.5-minute ‘Today I Learned’ video about hummingbirds:

What I want to be when I grow up: I have a PhD now, and I don’t think I will/should ever stop searching for the answer to this question. But- I want to bring people together to solve big problems in animal ecology and conservation, especially in the tropics. Science is my way of making sense of my world using observation and logic, and I would like to share my passion for science with the world. I saw my PhD as one (long-ish) step on a path to learning the tools, methods, teaching and outreach skills to do science and share it with people of all kinds. Getting a peek into organizations like WWF and National Geographic has convinced me that there are many great people creating hope in this sometimes-bleak world. And the key to unleashing this hope is opening people’s minds. Turning skeptics of science, slowly and steadily, into believers, involving local communities in conservation, and most importantly, growing children to be observers, doers, and scientists - no matter what profession they choose. People seem most influenced by a few key people in their past- we as scientists need to get better at being those key influencers.

I have a great interest in science communication- I think it is a shame for so much fascinating science to sit on dusty library shelves or in dusty internet blackholes. Here are some of the initiatives I am a part of, to either facilitate scientists being more transparent communicators, or to try being a better communicator myself: National Geographic Society - see the videos on the (outreach/videos)[https://anushashankar.weebly.com/outreachvideos.html] page and a blog article on my research; BrainChem (& Ecology), a popular science site I run with Chemical Neurobiologist Pratik Kumar; Science Outside, a website featuring fun stories from field scientists; Crowd-funded project on nesting hummingbirds that I am working on with Erich Eberts- a past student of mine- and other collaborators; Crowd-funded project titled “Do hummingbirds actually sleep” with Dr. Don Powers and students

We are on the cover of the May 2020 edition of the Journal of Avian Biology!

For our paper on hummingbird torpor.

Cover image of a green-crowned brilliant: Sean Graesser (gourmetbiologist)

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Contact: Anusha Shankar | Twitter: @nushiamme | Email: anusha.shankarcornell.edu